We characterize optimal voluntary disclosures by a privately informed agent facing a counterparty endowed with market power in a bilateral transaction. Although disclosures reveal some of the agent's private information, they may increase his information rents by mitigating the counterparty's...

This paper studies the general information disclosure model (Grossman, 1981; Milgrom, 1981) relaxing the assumption of monotonicity in preferences. I apply the belief-based approach, which is developed in Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011) and applied to cheap talk (Lipnowski and...

New technologies such as product simulators and virtual reality now allow firms to provide realistic product usage experiences and reduce buyer uncertainty about product quality. We argue that today's firms should view product design and investments to reduce buyer uncertainty as an integrated...

This paper studies the incentive of a long run seller to disclose past offers when trading with a sequence of short-run buyers. Compared with the models of mandatory disclosure or mandatory non-disclosure, there is a new set of equilibria generated by allowing flexibility in the disclosure...

This paper studies the incentive of a long run seller to disclose past offers when trading with a sequence of short-run buyers. Compared with the models of mandatory disclosure or mandatory non-disclosure, there is a new set of equilibria generated by allowing flexibility in the disclosure...

A sender chooses ex ante how her information will be disclosed to a privately informed receiver who then takes one of two actions. The sender wishes to maximize the probability that the receiver takes the desired action. The sender faces an ex ante quantity-quality tradeoff: sending positive...

A key feature of communication with evidence is skepticism: to the extent possible, a receiver will attribute any incomplete disclosure to the sender concealing unfavorable evidence. The degree of skepticism depends on how much evidence the sender is expected to possess. I characterize when a...

Certifiers often base their decisions on a mixture of information, some of which is voluntarily disclosed by applicants, and some of which they acquire by way of tests or otherwise. We study the interplay between the information acquisition of certifiers and the information disclosure of...

We develop and test a theory of blind disclosure. A risk-averse sender chooses whether to disclose information based on a preliminary, private signal. In the unique equilibrium, contrary to the literature's canonical unraveling result, senders disclose only if their preliminary signal exceeds a...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. Our theory-driven laboratory experiment investigates this strategic use of vagueness in voluntary disclosure and asks whether there is scope for policy to improve information transmission. We find that vagueness is profitably...